Fire and Ice
BY ROBERT FROST
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
In a "Science and the Arts” presentation from 1960, astronomer Harlow Shapley makes the claim to have inspired Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” poem. Shapley had met Frost a year before the poem was published, and Frost had asked him, as a reputed astronomer, how he thought the world would end. Shapley replied that either the Earth will be incinerated as a result of the explosion of the sun or, should the Earth escape this fate, it will end up slowly freezing in deep space in any case. So the Earth will end either by fire, consumed by the Sun, or by ice, carrying on as a cold and lifeless rock. Shapley considers Frost’s poem to be an example of how science can influence the creation of art, or clarify its meaning. He may well be right. But I’d like to present another interpretation, one that goes much deeper than the physical causality examined by natural science. In this view, Frost is using the physical threats of fire and ice to comment on the quality of human relationships rather than on the end of the physical world. Frost’s references to desire and hate suggest that some such meaning is intended here. We really do seem to be talking about something more than merely objective properties, with objectification being considered a life-, even a world-threatening, dehumanization.
Frost may be alluding to the Inferno in Dante’s Comedy, where both fire and ice exist as punishments for unrepentant sin. Dante also writes of will and desire being “turned by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” (Comedy, Paradiso 33: 142-146). This notion of Love as an immanent animating force gives us the clue. Fire and ice are opposites in the same way that desire, as lust, born of fire, and hate, born out of ice, denoting a cold-heartedness, a lack of human feeling or care, are opposites. Desire and hate are not just opposite emotions in this context, they are extremes, extremes of love, of physical and spiritual love, of the love of human beings, of humanity, of the Earth, of life ... Life ceases at either extreme. Both extremes destroy the soul of the individual, the soul of humanity, and the soul of the world, and the metaphors of fire and ice fit that destruction perfectly. The simple beauty of Frost’s poem is revealed when we see the two opposites of fire and ice as forming a unity, predicting the end which comes to the world on the outside when it dies on the inside. And the world dies when its central core of love is denied in the human heart and is sent to the margins. We live in a relational world, a public world, a practical world and a social world. The world is not an external, objective datum fit only for pure passive scientific contemplation. Get the inner relations wrong in their human aspects, and we are going to Hell.
I dislike the concept of Hell and would prefer to avoid it. The idea has been overused and misused over the centuries and it is best to be wary in employing it. The danger with such a notion is that it divides the world between the forces of infallible good and of irredeemable evil, so that your side, ‘friends’ determined by political loyalties and commitments, can do no wrong whilst ‘enemies,’ those with opposing views can do no right. That mires us in a toxic zero-sum world in which there can be no winners, only losers, which is all of us ultimately. It’s the end of politics and it diminishes us all. The approach involves a dangerous mindset. The problem with fighting wars against evil is that you may well turn into the very evil you are fighting. Hell is embroidery, a poetry, or a mythology that serves to elaborate certain points about right living and wrong living. It can be useful in showing how bad actions and choices have bad consequences, both for those who take them and, since we live in a social world, for others. Dante is big on the social sins, with his Inferno evincing a political model, affirming by negative example the positive appreciation of politics as concerning the regimen for the human good. Dante emphasises that we are always free and responsible in acting the way we do. That is how I read and value Dante’s critique of estrangement and disconnection and the diabolic inversion and perversion of the good in the Inferno. At the same time, Hell is a human invention and, like all such inventions, it is one that can rebound on us, giving us the power and justification for human beings to do terrible things to one other. God is not here. The Inferno is an entirely human world, an all-too-human world. But that is precisely the point about human power, culture, technology, knowledge: it can be creative, it can be destructive. The road to Hell is paved with good inventions as well as bad ones. When we have a wealth of means but a confusion of ends, we dwindle away in a world of diminishing meaning. So whilst I have a great deal of sympathy with those who would prefer to close Hell down and send the devil packing, I do think this is an evasion of the big issues at stake here – good and bad and the human ability to choose one or the other, and the human responsibility to make that choice. This is precisely the issue raised by industrialisation and the extension of human technological power over the world. But just be aware of the danger that, in fighting the forces of Hell, you may become a devil yourself.
I like Dante's Comedy for the reason that it is not merely a summa, an encyclopaedia that covers all knowledge, all of life and its living, but is knowledge with moral purpose and public intent. Dante makes it clear throughout his great poem that human beings are free moral agents whose actions have consequences, both good and bad, intended and unintended. We are social beings; what we do impacts on others and on the world around us. We are charged with the duty to use our intellect, our rationality, to know what is true and right, and to choose and act accordingly. He doesn’t evade the difficult issues of sin and punishment. It can be very uncomfortable to read the way Dante places the characters in Hell, with a moral logic so precise and inexorable as to seem lacking in mercy. Jesus did not judge in this way. But Dante is not really judging and punishing, merely elaborating a taxonomy of vices and virtues which makes it clear that there is a penalty for bad behaviour. I make it clear that such an approach can easily backfire, when people use such a taxonomy for political purposes. We are seeing that very thing in the contemporary world, on the part of men and women who are following ‘gods’ of their own. But we need to be clear the way that Dante structures this argument, what he is getting at – what it is to be a fulfilled human being, and the ways in which we fall short, and how totally we may fail. Dante describes free will as ‘God’s greatest gift.’ That free will can be misused and abused; if it couldn’t, it wouldn’t be free. Dante teaches discernment. And the approach is not just personal. There is a political model running through Dante’s Comedy in recognition of the fact that human beings are social beings with roles and responsibilities within the social world. Personal responsibility is important. Without it, public life is empty and abstract. But I always try to qualify the emphasis on personal responsibility with an emphasis on institutional responsibility, the way that individuals are locked within socially structured patterns and habits of behaviour that can only be turned to good against bad by joining with others in common endeavour. Again, though, Dante writes beautifully on the city and on politics as public spheres in which active, informed citizens may come together and determine together affairs of common concern.
Any “Hell on Earth” we are facing is a self-made Hell. Human beings took control long ago, believing the Earthly Paradise possible by way of reason, science, and technology. It’s a noble vision, with plenty to commend it. Human beings are healthier, wealthier, better educated and longer lived than at any time in history, and in much greater numbers. Don’t assume such an achievement to be the normal condition, before pronouncing that the world is about to end. But … there is a dialectic of progress in which all things seem pregnant with their opposites:
‘Life is frightened out of its highly enlightened wits by the return of ancient nightmares: the tales of the sorcerer's apprentice, of dwarfs with magic powers. The promise of Heaven for the poor in spirit is understood to mean that, on earth at least, they should be educated into clever people able to manipulate and let loose the technical installations of Hell. And in art, there are sounds most skilfully organized, furies expressed in the most virtuoso fashion, and proud of signifying nothing. Whole systems of aesthetics are evolved to justify this state of affairs. A world emptied of meaning seeks to escape from the infinite boredom of its meaninglessness by the magic of words without flesh, and forms without content. And, indeed, the attempt to distil poetry from the things or ideas that form our 'real' world would be in vain.’
Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind. 1952
But a self-made Hell is one that can possibly be unmade.
Three decades ago, when the world was talking about ‘the end of history,’ the zoologist Jonathan Kingdon wrote the book Self-Made Man and His Undoing (1993). He writes: ‘Drawn further and further out of our biological matrix we have become more and more dependent on an all-embracing but loveless technology to see us through. Under this impassive influence we have become orphans of our own technology.’ He continues:
‘We cannot make a scapegoat of the technological revolution that has pampered us yet passed by the emaciated victims we see on television. It is an extension of what we are. If we are greedy and selfish technology will be a faithful mirror. Left to its own dynamics technological and industrial innovation trashes products, places and people. Technology is at once social shredder, racial churn and political furnace. It is for the children of technology to humanise their parent or, like Saturn, it will consume them. Self-made Man and his society will be undone. If the twenty-first century sets out to build a new sense of family it has powerful tools to help in the task. If it doesn't, its antithesis - increasing conflicts between haves and have-nots - is inevitable.’
‘The study of natural processes, so long confined to the laboratory, has now moved on to the broad stage of international politics and raises issues that must engage us in new struggles.’
‘This cannot be a mere technical fix but will involve a social and spiritual revolution.’
Kingdon 1993: 316-317.
And that entails right actions for right reasons within right relationships. Which takes me back to where I started, addressing the moral ecology of fire and ice and not merely the natural processes at work.
In the third ring of the seventh circle of Hell, the worst ring of that circle, are those who have committed the greater crime, that of violence against Nature and hence against God. Dante presents a picture of lost and wondering souls assailed by a perpetual rain of fire in an arid desert wasteland …
Dante has some words as to why we have ended up here. Through ‘foul usury’, humankind violates the Creation, our God given dwelling, committing a violence against God by ‘despising Nature and her goodness’ (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans, by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series LXXX, Paradiso, 22: 151 and Inferno, 11: 46-48 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). There is nothing in the Bible which entitles human beings to hold in contempt, destroy, or exterminate anything on Earth, the stewardship that ‘dominion’ affirms holds precisely the contrary. We may use the gifts of nature but have no right to ruin or waste them. We have the right to use what we need, but no more than that. The Bible forbids usury and condemns great accumulations of property. As Dante argues, ‘the usurer condemns Nature ... for he puts his hope elsewhere.’ (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, 11: 109-11.) By taking more than we are entitled to, we are destroying our place within Creation and, as a result, are destroying our own Being.
In ordering the sins against Nature and God, Dante distinguishes between sins of incontinence and sins of malice. Sins of incontinence are lesser sins, passions which got the better of individuals, which they were not able to contain – lust, gluttony, avarice, anger and prodigality. Sins of malice are the worst of all, since they involve a perversion of human reason or intellect, the deliberate use of intelligence for the wrong ends, for private gain or advantage, at the expense of others, causing injury to others. Many people sin unwittingly, ‘for they know not what they do’. But we have a moral duty to know. Worst of all, though, are those who sin wittingly, who put their private gain or advantage before the good of all, to the detriment of all.
The deeper one goes into Dante’s Inferno, the smarter are the sinners we encounter. Those uncomfortable with judgement and punishment need to understand that the damned are those who always refuse to accept responsibility for their actions, express contrition, and embrace free will positively as God’s greatest gift of all. Such sinners arrogate to themselves the right to sin with impunity. And society in general and people in particular bear the costs.
In Laudato Si, Pope Francis writes on the environmental crisis: “It is remarkable how weak international political responses have been. The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance. There are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up trumping the common good and manipulating information so that their own plans will not be affected” (54).
Dante would pose the question, how many of those acting in a self-interested way to the detriment of the common good, do so knowingly? To be more precise, are there self-interested parties who are so committed to prevailing social and economic arrangements that benefit them in the immediate and short-term, whatever the social and ecological cost as a whole, that they actively and knowingly deny either or both the problem of climate change and the proposed solutions to it? I would also pose the same question with respect to those claiming to offer climate solutions, not least those which involve extensive and expensive governmental intervention. The questions serve to protect society against the possibilities of rents and free-riding, both public and private.
To the question, I would reply ‘yes.’ How could it not be in the less than perfect, fallen, political world? Such is the political world of competing social interests, groups and classes we live in. And Dante reserves some of the deepest places in Hell for them. The problem, in an age of non-belief, is this: such people may well not get their just deserts in the afterlife, just as the good folk who do the right thing may well not get to Heaven as their reward. Here’s my appeal at its most modest: if we act as though Hell and Heaven are realities, and take our second chances to choose and act wisely and responsibly in the middle ground, then we may well yet succeed in taking our place on earth as our ‘common home’, a Paradiso indeed. That's a deliberately minimal claim I make, minimal assumptions for maximum agreement. I’m not happy with it, it doesn’t express my view at all. It savours too much of that ‘ironic liberalism’ which bids us to act as though our most cherished values have foundations and justifiable reasons, even though we know and accept that they do not. Such a philosophy of bad faith will run to ground sooner or later.
But, yes, we can all meet the minimal requirements to act well. If we don’t, if we choose and act badly, if we fail to come together and constitute ourselves as a ‘we’ in politics, generate the form and forms of the common life enabling us to conduct our common affairs in light of the long-term common good, if we continue to let free-riders control our futures, then one day bad actions generating bad consequences will indeed turn the Earth into a hellhole. Anyone who knows anything about politics knows just how big each of these ‘ifs’ really are. Dante’s imagery might be stark, unpleasant even, but he is encouraging us to think deeply on the key existential questions of who we are, where we are, how we live our lives and how we ought to live our lives, what mental, moral and institutional capacities and tools we need to live well, how we order our relationships between ourselves and with the world, how we arrange our affairs not merely to live but to live well.
In the eighth circle of Hell, we are confronted with the sin of fraud. The fraudulent are thieves who deprive other people of their rightful share of earthly goods. Bear in mind that for Dante fortuna is something we all have to deal with in life, life is how we act in face of fortune, the things that befall us. The fraudulent use their intellect to cheat fortune and are therefore ministers of ill fortune. Further on in the descent into Hell, we meet the counsellors of fraud, the sowers of discord and the falsifiers. Yes, the falsifiers, the people who deny truth and turn it into its opposite for their own gain. Their punishment is to suffer in the valley of the diseased for all the disease they have spread in society. For the secular amongst us, there is no consolation in any of this, for it is the men and women of good will, as well as the more-than-human world, who suffer in the meantime from this dis-ease, receiving punishment by way of social dislocation and ecological despoliation for the sins of others.
When we enter the lowest depths of Hell, the very bottom circle, we leave behind the fire and enter a barren icy wasteland. Here we enter the circle of the treacherous, where the sinners are immersed in ice. Here we find the traitors, traitors to their kindred and to their country. For Dante, treachery is the worst sin of all, since it entails a cold-hearted turning on one’s own kin. Here Dante meets Lucifer, in the very centre of the earth, trapped in ice as a parody of the trinity, a parody of true Christian love. Hell is the anti-Paradise.
Patriotism? What does that word denote? Place and people. To whom or what do we owe loyalty? I can perhaps make Dante’s point here more understandable by reference to an eco-patriotism, an oikophilia, as a love of place, and a biophilia, as a love of life. In a chapter in Here on Earth calling for human beings to embrace biophilia as a condition of their own survival, ecologist Tim Flannery quotes the Bible: ‘A new commandment I give unto you. That ye love one another.’ (John 13). Flannery wants us to love life as a whole as well as each other.
‘I am certain of one thing—if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further human progress is possible here on Earth.’
Flannery 2010 ch 23
Flannery writes of ‘just letting heavens’ performance run on and on’ (Flannery 2010 ch 5). I don’t much care whether we call this Creation Care with Pope Francis or Earthcare with Carolyn Merchant, for the reason that I am more concerned with reality than with names. It just seems obvious to me that if you believe in a Creator God then you are going to respect and look after the Creation – or ought to - just as it is obvious that if you want to live healthy and flourishing lives, you are going to respect and look after the sources of life, our biological and ecological matrix. As Flannery writes:
‘But those ancient practices just might teach us something more—that people blessed with healthy, diverse ecosystems are likely to endure and prosper. I say this because environments with intact keystone species are more productive, and therefore better habitats for humans.’
Flannery 2010: ch 8
Flannery argues that human beings should adopt the concept of biophilia so as to appreciate biodiversity as a condition of flourishing. To destroy those ecosystems, pollute the sources of life, engage in practices that render species extinct, ruin habitats and burn up the earth – that’s what I would call treachery, a treachery against our kin, a treachery that is an affront to our kinship not just with other human beings but with other species. Our common home is built upon the common ground in which we share universal kinships and co-operations. Biologists point to the genetic unity of life. Ethicists point to the moral unity. All organisms are descended from the same life form. We are bonded to the living environment by the genetic unity of all life, kinship and ancient history. Good economics, they say in commodifying and exploiting ‘natural resources’, ‘progress’, ‘jobs, growth and investment’. Treachery, I call it, ‘foul usury’ in Dante’s words, a violation of God and Nature.
Many people associate the term ‘biophilia’ with the biologist E.O. Wilson. I know it from its earlier appearance in the work of social psychologist/critical theorist Erich Fromm. Fromm writes:
‘I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.’
Fromm, E. The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1965
That seems right and reasonable. I tend to write of ‘happiness’ as flourishing these days as well as freedom, mind. And, with St Thomas Aquinas, I write of virtuous action and a sufficiency of material goods within right relationships.
A parallel can be drawn between the idea of a self-made Hell with Max Weber’s view of capitalist modernity as an ‘iron cage’ that determines the lives of those confined within it with ‘irresistible force’.
'The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.'
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1985: 181
A parallel can also be drawn between Max Weber’s view of the mechanised modern world as an ‘iron cage’ confining its human creators and Dante’s figure of Lucifer frozen and immobilised in Hell.
Oh in etterno faticoso manto! ‘O weary mantle for eternity!’, ‘Oh what a toilsome cloak to wear forever!’ [Inferno 23: 58-69]
The way that Lucifer, the most beautiful and noble of all the angels, has been reduced to mere mechanical form indicates the immobilizing of personality which results from sin. Life, too, ossifies. Lucifer, as the greatest sinner, is utterly immobilised, doomed to spend eternity petrified in the ice of his own creation. And here he suffers the ultimate pain of isolation. This is petrification as excommunication, severing the connection to others. Dante knew exile from others as a death sentence itself, the destruction of the social nature of a human being.
It is no accident that the bottom of Dante's Hell is the frozen cold. The core of eternal punishment in The Comedy is not a furnace of fire, as many believe, but a lake of ice where sinners are frozen hard and fast forever. This image seems to contradict what many consider to be the "traditional" picture of Hell, but is, in fact, deeply traditional, growing out of a complex of inter-related Augustinian language, conceptuality and metaphor that had already shaped the thinking of the West for nearly a thousand years. As Carey writes:
Within this traditional complex fire is predominantly a heavenly rather than hellish metaphor. For flame by nature rises, heading (as ancient physics would have it) toward its home among the fiery stars of heaven. Charity in Augustine is spiritual fire, an ardent desire raising the soul toward God. The movements of Dante's souls are governed by this metaphor of fiery charity. The lake of solid ice at the bottom of the universe just works out its negative implications: the descent into hell means leaving warmth and light behind. Its positive implications can be seen in the happiness of Piccarda, at peace even in the lowest sphere of heaven because all her desires come to rest in the highest Light of all, like fire finding its natural place in the stars (Par 3:70-87). And the movement depicted by the metaphor can be seen in the wonderful rule of ascent on Mount Purgatory, where the climb gets easier as you go (Purg. 4:88-94)--for the closer you get to heaven the less earthly is your weight and the more like fire, ascending naturally and without effort. Ice and fire, immobility and ascent, weight and rest, make visible the trajectories of love in Dante's world. We need sensible metaphors for this, because love is a movement not in space but in the will, a psychological rather than corporeal dimension which we can experience and understand but cannot literally imagine. For imagination requires sensible images drawn from the world of bodily things, while the soul is a dimension of its own, altogether beyond the grasp of the senses. So Dante, following Augustine, represents the one dimension by the other, using the bodily ascent of fire as a metaphor to represent the love which moves souls toward God.
Cary 2006: 5-36
Reading Dante’s description of Hell as a lake of ice where sinners are frozen hard and fast for all eternity, I cannot help draw a parallel with sociologist Max Weber’s conception of a rationalised, bureaucratised modernity. Weber shows how the objective discharge of roles and tasks within the modern bureaucratic world proceeds according to calculable rules, ‘without regard for persons’ (Weber 1991:215). Weber conceives modern bureaucratic organisation as a ‘mechanised petrification, embellished with a convulsive self-importance’, with human beings being confined in mind, body and soul within a steel hard cage, a physical and psychic prison that continues until ‘the last ton of fossilized fuel is burnt’. (Weber 1985:181/2). Petrification means the conversion of organic material into a fossilized form. Regulated from cradle to grave in a network of disciplines, we have fossilized ourselves. Our ‘mechanised petrification’ is of our own doing, through our self-importance, our selfishness.
In the Inferno, Dante describes the moat of thieves, where members find that not even their bodies are their own, but may be taken from them at any time by a fellow thief, leaving them to steal a body from someone else, and on and on for all eternity. (A selfish world which proceeds without ‘regard for persons.’) Dante describes the exchanges which take place in graphic detail. In one instance, a thief in the body of a reptile bites a thief in a human body on the naval.
Weber portrays modernity as a form of Hell:
'Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights.'
Weber 1970: 128.
Weber’s prophecy of an icy darkness and hardness for all eternity is Dante’s Hell on Earth, the ambition of a self-made paradise taking form as the inescapable an iron cage.
Our external triumph has been bought at the expense of an internal diminution. The expansion of means has delivered a diminution of meaning. And that hardening of the psyche, immobilising human sensibilities, is part and parcel of a steel hard machine civilisation whose addiction to the endless expansion and accumulation of material quantities is eating up the planet.
For Weber, we have lost the overarching moral framework by which we lived our lives. For Weber, we are doomed to live in a morally divided world. He poses the question, 'Which of the warring gods shall we serve?' (Weber 1970:155). Dante Alighieri gives us the answer by asking another question entirely.
Weber writes:
'No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."'
Weber 1985:182
Until the pathos arising from the inversion of means and ends is addressed, and life thereby re-enchanted, the accumulation of quantity through the exploitation of the planet will continue to misfire, delivering material riches at the expense of human happiness.
Which begs the question of whether it is possible to explore our ecological self while imprisoned in the steel hard cage of a rationalised modern necropolis powered by ancient wastes which Mother Nature, in her wisdom, has kept buried beneath her skin.
Dante’s Hell and Weber’s modernity as mechanised petrification is the end of the living world through both ice and fire, through the loss of true human relations, the loss of love of life, the loss of warm, affective ties and bonds. For all of the attention that is currently placed on the burning of fossil fuels, it’s the ice in human social relations that is the real problem, from which all other problems derive. Focus on the external manifestations without correcting the internal malaise, and we will remain locked up within an infernal praxis – the inner austerity will become institutionalised as an outer austerity. It’s all ice in here and out there. For Dante, such an end is born of idolatry, the veneration of human power as a false idol which serves to separate human beings from the true reality and from their true nature. Weber would refer to the pathos of means and ends, of means enlarged to displace genuine ends, ends we set ourselves through free will, ends which relate in some way to the meaning inherent in the world in which we live.
Weber’s description of the modern world as a ‘mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance’ is apt. The modern individual is subject to a material determinism without and an egoistic compulsion within, droning his or her life away within a material mechanism that proceeds ‘without regard for persons’, yet nevertheless inflating the importance of the most trivial things in order to make the point that, despite all evidence to the contrary, ‘I’ matter. That assertion on the part of individuals reveals something much more profound than narcissism and egoism – it reveals that the human quest for meaning endures, however impaired and distorted.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber was concerned to challenge the view that history is determined by economic interests. For Weber, the most powerful driver of change in history emerges from the synergy of moral motives, metaphysical ideals, and material interests. Neither element alone is enough to bring substantial change; what matters is their combined interaction. Those who single out just one factor, to the neglect of the others, are condemned to failure and worse. They may well make a bad situation worse in the attempt to make it better. What Kingdon calls a ‘social and spiritual revolution’ is to be considered part of the ‘metaphysical reconstruction’ that E.F. Schumacher demanded in his influential Small is Beautiful. People admired Schumacher’s recommendations on appropriate scale and technology but missed entirely what Schumacher considered to be the most important point – the need for metaphysical reconstruction. So much so, that he wrote a follow up book to clarify the matter, A Guide for the Perplexed. It was ignored, considered irrelevant in an age of science and technology. It is precisely because we live under the blinkered sway of scientism that the call for metaphysical reconstruction is pertinent.
Dante writes of the love that moves the sun and the other stars. Our relations to the planet are shaped by our relations to each other. This is why I would argue that the environmental movement is both material and metaphysical, why, for all of the emphasis on alternate technology, on science, on the crisis in the climate system, on the need to protect the health of ecosystems and preserve biodiversity, environmentalism is part of the human quest for meaning, but has to see itself as such consciously to avoid any bogus religiosity and debilitating surrogacy. To be successful in delivering the ecological transformation of human relations and politics that is required for a flourishing existence, the environmental movement has to transcend single-issue campaigning and adopt an integral approach that embraces ecology, economics, metaphysics, and morals. Properly, by which is meant respecting each of these things in their own terms rather than reducing them to science, and reducing science in turn to ‘the science.’ Because, at the deepest level, environmentalism is not merely about this or that issue, atmospheric pollution, extinction of species, ocean acidification, desertification etc, but about something much more profound. From this perspective, environmentalism is not merely a protest against the emptying of the world of its natural resources, but against the emptying of the world of its value and meaning. Environmentalism is about the recovery and affirmation of inherent value, in the sense of worth as deriving from the Old English word 'woerthship', from which we get 'worship.' What values do we worship? Which gods do we serve? I am therefore arguing for environmentalism as a movement that integrates material and metaphysical or spiritual motives in the quest for meaning in life. Properly and explicitly rather than surreptitiously. In fine, environmentalists act in defence of the cosmos as a whole, not its scenic parts. Environmentalism therefore re-unites politics and spirituality, refusing to separate out values from the public and material world in the way that has characterised our political and economic life in an age of atomistic, reductionist, scientific materialism. I think we can discern in environmentalism a profound need for a meaning and fulfilment that can only be described as spiritual, a need which transcends the materialist frame of ecology as science. But it needs to present itself as such, rather than keep burying morals and metaphysics as well as politics behind the assertion of science.
Where does responsibility lie? We each have the capacity for choice. Dante looks at the heart of the white rose and says I saw within its depths how it conceives all things in a single volume bound by love, of which the universe is the scattered leaves. This is the answer, from the depths of Hell through the delights of earth to the centre of all knowing and the mind of God - In each place humanity exists. And the underlying force that creates and unites humanity is the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
The real world? Paradiso? The world we could have had, the world we were gifted. The world that exists beyond time and space, no matter what we do to the earth we have been gifted? Dante remains my inspiration. He writes of the guidance that gives hope and shows us the way (Purgatorio 4: 29/30), 'di viva speme,' 'the living hope’ that enthuses and inspires us, that we need to act upon (Paradiso 20: 109), the love that turns the sun and the other stars, the eternal love that moves us and carries us through.
We are hearing the word 'disaster' a lot in these days of climate change and global heating. The word 'disaster' derives from the Latin 'dis-', meaning 'away', 'without', and 'astro', meaning 'star.' Hence 'disaster' means to be 'without a star'. Dante ends every canto of The Comedy with the stars. But the final verse of the Paradiso shows his real concern, the force behind it all.
'like a wheel in perfect balance turning,
I felt my will and my desire turned
by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.'
(Paradiso 33:142-146)
Love may be hanging on by a slender thread these days, but there's more than a few of us holding on to it, and I'm staying green. Properly green, green outside of the iron cage of the megamachine.
"By such a curse as theirs none is so lost, that the eternal Love cannot return, as long as hope maintains a thread of green." (Purgatorio 3: 133-135).
And I’m staying real. This wonderful piece of work by Teodolinda Barolini shows the distinction Dante makes between realism and reality, showing that we mistake the Inferno as the most realistic and the Paradiso the least - Dante's realism reaches its pinnacle in the Paradiso, exposes a deficiency in human understanding in seeing the most immediate realism rather than true reality:
'For Dante the question of reality or being leads inevitably to the question of creation, which carries with it two indispensable features: creation requires difference, and creation requires love. The creation of the Many from the One – “distinctio et multitudo rerum est a Deo” wrote St. Thomas [“the difference and multiplicity of things come from God” In the act that we call creation, God made difference, in Thomas’s words, “so that His goodness might be communicated to creatures and re-enacted through them” (ibid; Blackfriars 1967, 8:95)] (ST 1a.47.1) – is described by Dante as an erotically- tinged Big Bang, an explosion of ardor that bursts forth into flaming sparks of being:
La divina bontà, che da sé sperne ogne livore, ardendo in sé, sfavilla sì che dispiega le bellezze etterne. (Par. 7.64-66)
'Spurning any kind of envy, Divine Goodness, burning within, so sparkles, that it unfolds Eternal Beauty.'
The “bellezze etterne” are unfolded in an act of love, an act in which the Eternal opens itself in order to create the New: “s’aperse in nuovi amor l’etterno amore”, 'in these new loves, Eternal Love unfolded.' (Par. 29.18). This act of primordial opening is a radical affirmation of being. The Transcendent chooses to enter the flux of time and affirms itself as the ground of all that is in the declaration Subsisto (the use of direct discourse is perhaps the most ancient of Dante’s techniques of verisimilitude, already present in the rime giovanili).'
Teodolinda Barolini, Dante and Reality
https://www.academia.edu/4083607/Dante_and_Reality_Dante_and_Realism_Paradiso_
Now that's what I call real.